The reform movement is already failing

In my nearly four decades as a historian of education, I have analyzed the rise and fall of reform movements. Typically, reforms begin with loud declarations that our education system is in crisis. Throughout the twentieth century, we had a crisis almost every decade. After persuading the public that we are in crisis, the reformers bring forth their favored proposals for radical change. The radical changes are implemented in a few sites, and the results are impressive. As their reforms become widespread, they usually collapse and fail. In time, those who have made a career of educating children are left with the task of cleaning up the mess left by the last bunch of reformers.

We are in the midst of the latest wave of reforms, and Steven Brill has positioned himself as the voice of the new reformers. These reforms are not just flawed, but actually dangerous to the future of American education. They would, if implemented, lead to the privatization of a large number of public schools and to the de-professionalization of education.

As Brill’s book shows, the current group of reformers consists of an odd combination of Wall Street financiers, conservative Republican governors, major foundations, and the Obama administration. The reformers believe that the way to “fix” our schools is to fire more teachers, based on the test scores of their students; to open more privately-managed charter schools; to reduce the qualifications for becoming a teacher; and to remove job protections for senior teachers.

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What Does a Teacher Do?

By Bob Sickles, President and Publisher, Eye On Education

As my staff and I began planning a roundtable webcast on teacher evaluation, a fundamental question emerged: What does a teacher do? Examining this question might shed some light on the teacher accountability debate which had been discussed in a recent issue of Education Week.

As the founder and CEO of a profitable education publishing company, I’m all for the entrepreneurial spirit and the push for accountability. Yet I feel uncomfortable when my MBA friend argues that our educational problems would be resolved if only schools would behave more like for-profit companies in the private sector. He wants to tie teacher evaluation to standardized test scores. His sole focus on high stakes tests is grounded in his desire to equate profit growth with test score increases.

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A simple honest question for SB5 supporters

As we await the official release of the 2011 Ohio school report card data due tomorrow, we were looking over the 2009/2010 data and a question occurred.

Here's the breakdown of charter school performance in Ohio, taken from the ODE community Schools rating table

Designation	Total	Percentage
Academic Emergency	76	23.8%
Academic Watch	53	16.6%
Continuous Improvement	97	30.4%
Effective	32	10.0%
Excellent	27	8.5%
Excellent with Distinction	1	0.3%
Not Rated	33	10.3%
Grand Total	319	100%

Here's the question. If charter schools can;

• Compensate their teachers based on any criteria they choose since they are unencumbered by a union contract (ie merit pay)
• Employ teachers without offering a continuing contract (ie tenure)
• Fire or lay off teachers for any performance based criteria without need to follow a union contract (ie no seniority)
• Avoid class size limits created by a union contract
• Be free to impose any legal work place restrictions or rules they wish
• Be unencumbered by any union contract provision and be free from a whole host of regulations

Why is it that their performance is so darn terrible (over 70% are less than effective!) as to be embarrassing even though they have been operating with SB5 like "tools" for years?

Why would anyone think applying these SB5 "tools" to traditional public schools will have any positive impact when we have evidence that when they are applied to charter schools the results are disastrous for students, teachers and the local school districts.? Can anyone answer that?

Why won’t Ms. Rhee talk to USA Today?

Michele Rhee has suddenly gone tight lipped

It’s hard to find a media outlet, big or small, that she hasn’t talked to. She’s been interviewed by Katie Couric, Tom Brokaw and Oprah Winfrey. She’s been featured on a Time magazine cover holding a broom (to sweep away bad teachers). She was one of the stars of the documentary “Waiting for Superman.” ... And yet, as voracious as she is for the media spotlight, Ms. Rhee will not talk to USA Today.
[...]
On May 2, another Rhee spokeswoman e-mailed to say the reporters were too interested in cheating and not enough in StudentsFirst. She said they could submit a list of questions.

There were 21 questions; Ms. Rhee did not answer 10 of the 11 about cheating.

Mr. Gillum, who recently took a job at The Associated Press, said he was surprised by how unresponsive Ms. Rhee has been. “She talks about how important data is, and our story is data driven,” he said.

The whole article sheds an enormous amount of light on the shady way Michele Rhee and her "StudentsFirst" organization operates.

Only right wing partisans endorse SB5

The Pro SB5 campaign "BetterOhio" is touting an endorsement today, that of the NFIB. The NFIB is a right wing business group that represents a tiny fraction of small businesses in the state (approximately 2.5%), so its support comes as no surprise.

Indeed in 2010 that NFIB contributed $10,000 to the Kasich for Governor campaign, and in 2006 it contributed $7,500 to the Ken Blackwell campaign - a candidate few argued was so extreme as to lie well outside of the mainstream.

The NFIB is so partisan that in the last 10 years (according to www.transparencydata.org) it has contributed just $2,550.00 to Democratic candidates while an astonishing $242,123.81 has been contributed to Republicans. 99% of NFIB political contributions over the last decade have gone to Republican party candidates, making the NFIB one of the most partisan organizations in the state and the country.

Below is that list of contributions the NFIB has made

NFIB Contributions

HEre at Join the Future we continue to maintain that repealing SB5 with a NO vote on issue 2 is personal not partisan. The anti worker forces however continue to be made up entirely and exclusively from the Republican party establishment.

Merit Pay: The End Of Innocence?

The current teacher salary scale has come under increasing fire, and for a reason. Systems where people are treated more or less the same suffer from two basic problems. First, there will always be a number of "free riders". Second, and relatedly, some people may feel their contributions aren’t sufficiently recognized. So, what are good alternatives? I am not sure; but based on decades worth of economic and psychological research, measures such as merit pay are not it.

Although individual pay for performance (or merit pay) is a widespread practice among U.S. businesses, the research on its effectiveness shows it to be of limited utility (see here, here, here, and here), mostly because it’s easy for its benefits to be swamped by unintended consequences. Indeed, psychological research indicates that a focus on financial rewards may serve to (a) reduce intrinsic motivation, (b) heighten stress to the point that it impairs performance, and (c) promote a narrow focus reducing how well people do in all dimensions except the one being measured.

In 1971, a research psychologist named Edward Deci published a paper concluding that, while verbal reinforcement and positive feedback tends to strengthen intrinsic motivation, monetary rewards tend to weaken it. In 1999, Deci and his colleagues published a meta-analysis of 128 studies (see here), again concluding that, when people do things in exchange for external rewards, their intrinsic motivation tends to diminish. That is, once a certain activity is associated with a tangible reward, such as money, people will be less inclined to participate in the task when the reward is not present. Deci concluded that extrinsic rewards make it harder for people to sustain self-motivation.

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